Psalm 91:4-6.
He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday."
Happy October guys! This year is winding down. Fall is officially here. Meaning the trees are about to lose their leaves and the grounds will be covered with foliage creating somewhat like mosaic art on the streets of those of us who live above the equator.
I love the fall. It's actually my favorite season.
I found out that October used to be the eighth month on the Roman calendar.
Hence 'octo" which means eight. I also found out that this is the time where farmers expect to receive their harvest.
If you didn't know, the number eight means "new beginnings." In addition to that, it symbolizes, so I've discovered, regeneration and resurrection. Putting all of this together with the natural expectation of farmers' harvest, I'm catching that similar happenings will occur in the spirit.
Then, translate in the natural.
You will notice that some areas of your life will regenerate and other areas once buried by the debris of past wars fought, will resurrect.
This combination will be expressed as some kind of harvest or return on your investments.
A beautiful reaping, I'm hearing.
This does not mean that you are to take a more lackadaisical approach to your walk in God.
You still have to be diligent and disciplined in your affairs.
I do pray that you are a good steward over whatever it is that you reap.
I give you full permission to take this up with God, to see if this word applies to you.
Alright, by now you all should be familiar with me enough to know that I'm a movie buff. My favorite genre before action, is psycho-thriller.
You know the movies that makes you think?
Those!
So there was a movie that came out in 1999 directed by M. Night Shyamalan,
called 6th Sense.
Because I'm not sure who've seen this movie,
(If you haven't, where have you been your entire life?) I won't tell the full plot. But it's about a little boy who's being haunted by ghosts with unresolved issues. The person he's comfortable talking to is a child psychologist played by the actor Bruce Willis.
That's all I'm going to tell you. That much I'm sure though, is just enough for us to divulge in today's topic of discussion.
This does not mean that you are to take a more lackadaisical approach to your walk in God.
You still have to be diligent and disciplined in your affairs.
I do pray that you are a good steward over whatever it is that you reap.
I give you full permission to take this up with God, to see if this word applies to you.
Alright, by now you all should be familiar with me enough to know that I'm a movie buff. My favorite genre before action, is psycho-thriller.
You know the movies that makes you think?
Those!
So there was a movie that came out in 1999 directed by M. Night Shyamalan,
called 6th Sense.
Because I'm not sure who've seen this movie,
(If you haven't, where have you been your entire life?) I won't tell the full plot. But it's about a little boy who's being haunted by ghosts with unresolved issues. The person he's comfortable talking to is a child psychologist played by the actor Bruce Willis.
That's all I'm going to tell you. That much I'm sure though, is just enough for us to divulge in today's topic of discussion.
T-R-A-U-M-A
Pause real quick.
Don't laugh! I used to be afraid of the dark until I was 21. The only reason I got over that fear was because I HAD to once I moved out of my parents' home to live alone. I was in no mood to pay a high electric bill with my meager college student income as a result of being too scared to turn off the lights at night!
Even still for a few weeks, I would keep my bathroom light on at night. That is until I grew tired of myself. Babygirl, has never been able to sleep with any kind of light on, other than natural lighting. I was fooling myself big time.
This fear actually stemmed from my childhood though. I had a very acute sense of sight beyond the physical (still do) that would terrify me so bad. I tried to explain it to my parents and siblings about my ability to discern and pick up on stuff that nobody else could, to no avail.
On top of having a very colorful imagination, trying to go to sleep at night was a torment in an of itself.
This is probably why I loved the 6th Sense so much.
I could partially relate.
Which leads me back to the matter at hand, TRAUMA.
We've all been through some stuff that has left us traumatized. Some of us have been through things far worse than others. Nevertheless, these situations if we can be honest today, in someway shape or form has molded us into who we currently are.
I was engaged in a very interesting conversation this weekend with one of my old supervisors of whom I've placed great confidence in not only because of her history of practicing great integrity but also because of her ability to give it to me straight no chaser.
She could care less about hurting my little feelings.
Laughably, I don't mind it all.
Well the conversation went from light and comedic to super serious after she began to ask me questions and make comments that would hit my soul in places I didn't even know was possible to be affected.
I hated it and I loved it.
I wanted to end it and keep it going at the same time.
I knew it was a timely and ordained conversation.
Because of what it was doing to me.
What were we talking about? You guessed it! Trauma.
Trauma if it's not dealt with and dealt with properly can follow us everywhere.
No matter where it originated, it has the power to dictate the decisions we make.
It has the liberty to orchestrate the way we behave and interact with others.
Trauma can turn a full grown adult into a cowering child in an instant.
Trauma, is the ghosts of our past that can be triggered by many variables including change/transition.
Kids see ghosts sometimes.
Until God says otherwise, so far I believe I have been delivered from most of my childhood trauma. However, talking with my old supervisor, I've discovered that I have some very fresh adulthood trauma I would not have necessarily deemed it to be so, until now.
This is what happened, to protect my privacy and my heart, I must limit the details of the conversation. Anyway, my old supervisor made some friendly suggestions and I basically kept responding with excuses. She in turn asked some critical thinking questions that I couldn't respond to quickly.
Questions that forced me to examine the current position of my heart, mind, and soul.
And like in the movie Ghost (please tell me you've at least seen THIS movie, my God!), shadowy figures came creeping out of the cracks and crevices of my being in the form of adulthood trauma.
So now I'm shifting the heat over to y'all. (Because I'm low-key petty. Ha!) Let's refer back to what I stated about how trauma can be triggered by many variables including change/transition. What area in your life can you confidently say you should be further off in? What area in your life can you say you're stagnant or feel stuck?
Don't get me wrong, God will most definitely hold you still for a minute to prune and grow you.
Then there are other times where WE can be so traumatized by something that happened to us in the past that we place ourselves in a prison.
That part looks like when we should be operating in faith but instead we're deactivated by fear.
Oh snaps! There goes that word again, FEAR.
If someone slapped you in your face to leave a mark, fear shows up as a flinch whenever a completely different person raises their hand for anything.
Some of us are in real time living in a perpetual flinch.
Jesus!
Perfect illustration of a perpetual flinch: The children of Israel after making their exodus out of Egypt. The place of their bondage, abuse, and oppression.
They spent 40 years in the wilderness before reaching Canaan. A trip that shouldn't have even taken them a whole month!
You can't tell me these people weren't in some way traumatized!
Consider their reality, post-exodus. They were chained, beaten, and made to do extra work because they were fruitful in number.
Once they finally escaped, they would be haunted by a reality that they were no longer a part of!
Their trauma would be regurgitated as constant murmuring, complaining, arrested development, and an inability to completely submit to the authority of God represented to them through Moses.
Catch this please!
It goes to show that no matter how much physical mobility you have, if trauma is lying dormant in your psyche, it will create barriers mentally that won't necessarily exist physically.
Here's another example, there are people who've experienced abandonment at some point in their lives so they'll either self sabotage or be super clingy/needy.
Matter of fact, there are people suffering from post traumatic stress period, and either don't even know it because their coping mechanisms are so entrenched in their souls. Or they do know this but have established that their methods to cope are okay, even if seasons in their lives have proven otherwise.
I've often found myself ministering to people one on one throughout my journey in God. Most of the times this has never been planned by myself. Nonetheless, I've been blessed with great insight due to these encounters. There was one particular early middle aged woman I met through work. I'll call her Sheba. A natural beauty with charisma, childlike wonder, and a great sense of humor.
Her birthday was a few days after mine which I believe is how we connected in the first place. Unbeknownst to her, I would observe her quirks and figure out her vices very early on in our relationship. They were nagging and annoying antics that revealed glimpses of her trauma. One day, I invited her to the movies. I shared with her some transparent moments in my life and was candid about my previous struggles.
This gesture would eventually allow her to give me access to what she'd experienced in her life which was a combination of severe physical and emotional abuse by her mother and neglect/abandonment by romantic lovers.
Her main pride and joy would be her adult daughters whom she was able to pour into all of the love she so desperately needed herself and watch blossom.
However, the source of her cycles of dysfunction and toxic character habits was the trauma of her past. Whenever she would throw tantrums and make catty protests about the smallest things, I would see the little girl who was once unloved by her own mother and the young woman who was rejected by the men she gave her heart to.
There was one particular time I was trying to get her too see God in something she was dealing with. I was trying my hardest to break through that trauma. After a lot of wrestling with her, she stopped and stared at me with eyes that looked like little fish bowls and said,
"I can see it now. I can see Him."
John 8:32
"Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free"
Part of what I believe God is going to do this month aside from regenerating and resurrecting, is also restoring and restructuring. In order for Him to do such He will allow you to be confronted by the ghosts of your past. (Well hello there, Ebenezer Scrooge!)
This won't be to hurt you but to cause you to triumph over them.
There is no way you should feel comfortable with calling yourselves son's and daughters of a King while running from ghosts!
#Negative
The weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty through God for the pulling down of strongholds! (1 Corinthians 10:4)
Any trauma that we refuse to deal with, runs the risk of becoming a stronghold if it hasn't already.
God is going to turn up the heat that will trigger parts of ourselves that has made us afraid of moving forward into what He has called us to do. He must force us to confront whatever has us stifled, hindered, and/or muzzled.
It's time.
It's time for us to grab a hold of THE TRUTH. Not our truth because most of our truth is trauma! I'm just saying.
Our truth will keep us bound. Forever. God's truth will liberate us. Indefinitely.
If it means that some of us have to seek therapy then so be it! Some us will probably be led to a mentor of some sort that has the compassion and capacity to expose and shoo away pesty ghosts among other things.
Listen to me though, we are all prophetic utterances of God. He has invested expensive word into each and every one of us that He can't let return to Him void!
At the end of the day, we must accept that our greatest giants will not come from a distant place. Yet from a place that we are very much familiar with. From someplace deep within. We must also know that we've got stones in the form of the truth to fight and the same God who will set the stage for us to stand up to these giants, will stand proxy as well to assist us in defeating them.
Pause real quick.
Don't laugh! I used to be afraid of the dark until I was 21. The only reason I got over that fear was because I HAD to once I moved out of my parents' home to live alone. I was in no mood to pay a high electric bill with my meager college student income as a result of being too scared to turn off the lights at night!
Even still for a few weeks, I would keep my bathroom light on at night. That is until I grew tired of myself. Babygirl, has never been able to sleep with any kind of light on, other than natural lighting. I was fooling myself big time.
This fear actually stemmed from my childhood though. I had a very acute sense of sight beyond the physical (still do) that would terrify me so bad. I tried to explain it to my parents and siblings about my ability to discern and pick up on stuff that nobody else could, to no avail.
On top of having a very colorful imagination, trying to go to sleep at night was a torment in an of itself.
This is probably why I loved the 6th Sense so much.
I could partially relate.
Which leads me back to the matter at hand, TRAUMA.
We've all been through some stuff that has left us traumatized. Some of us have been through things far worse than others. Nevertheless, these situations if we can be honest today, in someway shape or form has molded us into who we currently are.
I was engaged in a very interesting conversation this weekend with one of my old supervisors of whom I've placed great confidence in not only because of her history of practicing great integrity but also because of her ability to give it to me straight no chaser.
She could care less about hurting my little feelings.
Laughably, I don't mind it all.
Well the conversation went from light and comedic to super serious after she began to ask me questions and make comments that would hit my soul in places I didn't even know was possible to be affected.
I hated it and I loved it.
I wanted to end it and keep it going at the same time.
I knew it was a timely and ordained conversation.
Because of what it was doing to me.
What were we talking about? You guessed it! Trauma.
Trauma if it's not dealt with and dealt with properly can follow us everywhere.
No matter where it originated, it has the power to dictate the decisions we make.
It has the liberty to orchestrate the way we behave and interact with others.
Trauma can turn a full grown adult into a cowering child in an instant.
Trauma, is the ghosts of our past that can be triggered by many variables including change/transition.
Kids see ghosts sometimes.
Until God says otherwise, so far I believe I have been delivered from most of my childhood trauma. However, talking with my old supervisor, I've discovered that I have some very fresh adulthood trauma I would not have necessarily deemed it to be so, until now.
This is what happened, to protect my privacy and my heart, I must limit the details of the conversation. Anyway, my old supervisor made some friendly suggestions and I basically kept responding with excuses. She in turn asked some critical thinking questions that I couldn't respond to quickly.
Questions that forced me to examine the current position of my heart, mind, and soul.
And like in the movie Ghost (please tell me you've at least seen THIS movie, my God!), shadowy figures came creeping out of the cracks and crevices of my being in the form of adulthood trauma.
So now I'm shifting the heat over to y'all. (Because I'm low-key petty. Ha!) Let's refer back to what I stated about how trauma can be triggered by many variables including change/transition. What area in your life can you confidently say you should be further off in? What area in your life can you say you're stagnant or feel stuck?
Don't get me wrong, God will most definitely hold you still for a minute to prune and grow you.
Then there are other times where WE can be so traumatized by something that happened to us in the past that we place ourselves in a prison.
That part looks like when we should be operating in faith but instead we're deactivated by fear.
Oh snaps! There goes that word again, FEAR.
If someone slapped you in your face to leave a mark, fear shows up as a flinch whenever a completely different person raises their hand for anything.
Some of us are in real time living in a perpetual flinch.
Jesus!
Perfect illustration of a perpetual flinch: The children of Israel after making their exodus out of Egypt. The place of their bondage, abuse, and oppression.
They spent 40 years in the wilderness before reaching Canaan. A trip that shouldn't have even taken them a whole month!
You can't tell me these people weren't in some way traumatized!
Consider their reality, post-exodus. They were chained, beaten, and made to do extra work because they were fruitful in number.
Once they finally escaped, they would be haunted by a reality that they were no longer a part of!
Their trauma would be regurgitated as constant murmuring, complaining, arrested development, and an inability to completely submit to the authority of God represented to them through Moses.
Catch this please!
It goes to show that no matter how much physical mobility you have, if trauma is lying dormant in your psyche, it will create barriers mentally that won't necessarily exist physically.
Here's another example, there are people who've experienced abandonment at some point in their lives so they'll either self sabotage or be super clingy/needy.
Matter of fact, there are people suffering from post traumatic stress period, and either don't even know it because their coping mechanisms are so entrenched in their souls. Or they do know this but have established that their methods to cope are okay, even if seasons in their lives have proven otherwise.
I've often found myself ministering to people one on one throughout my journey in God. Most of the times this has never been planned by myself. Nonetheless, I've been blessed with great insight due to these encounters. There was one particular early middle aged woman I met through work. I'll call her Sheba. A natural beauty with charisma, childlike wonder, and a great sense of humor.
Her birthday was a few days after mine which I believe is how we connected in the first place. Unbeknownst to her, I would observe her quirks and figure out her vices very early on in our relationship. They were nagging and annoying antics that revealed glimpses of her trauma. One day, I invited her to the movies. I shared with her some transparent moments in my life and was candid about my previous struggles.
This gesture would eventually allow her to give me access to what she'd experienced in her life which was a combination of severe physical and emotional abuse by her mother and neglect/abandonment by romantic lovers.
Her main pride and joy would be her adult daughters whom she was able to pour into all of the love she so desperately needed herself and watch blossom.
However, the source of her cycles of dysfunction and toxic character habits was the trauma of her past. Whenever she would throw tantrums and make catty protests about the smallest things, I would see the little girl who was once unloved by her own mother and the young woman who was rejected by the men she gave her heart to.
There was one particular time I was trying to get her too see God in something she was dealing with. I was trying my hardest to break through that trauma. After a lot of wrestling with her, she stopped and stared at me with eyes that looked like little fish bowls and said,
"I can see it now. I can see Him."
John 8:32
"Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free"
Part of what I believe God is going to do this month aside from regenerating and resurrecting, is also restoring and restructuring. In order for Him to do such He will allow you to be confronted by the ghosts of your past. (Well hello there, Ebenezer Scrooge!)
This won't be to hurt you but to cause you to triumph over them.
There is no way you should feel comfortable with calling yourselves son's and daughters of a King while running from ghosts!
#Negative
The weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty through God for the pulling down of strongholds! (1 Corinthians 10:4)
Any trauma that we refuse to deal with, runs the risk of becoming a stronghold if it hasn't already.
God is going to turn up the heat that will trigger parts of ourselves that has made us afraid of moving forward into what He has called us to do. He must force us to confront whatever has us stifled, hindered, and/or muzzled.
It's time.
It's time for us to grab a hold of THE TRUTH. Not our truth because most of our truth is trauma! I'm just saying.
Our truth will keep us bound. Forever. God's truth will liberate us. Indefinitely.
If it means that some of us have to seek therapy then so be it! Some us will probably be led to a mentor of some sort that has the compassion and capacity to expose and shoo away pesty ghosts among other things.
Listen to me though, we are all prophetic utterances of God. He has invested expensive word into each and every one of us that He can't let return to Him void!
At the end of the day, we must accept that our greatest giants will not come from a distant place. Yet from a place that we are very much familiar with. From someplace deep within. We must also know that we've got stones in the form of the truth to fight and the same God who will set the stage for us to stand up to these giants, will stand proxy as well to assist us in defeating them.
Amen and amen again. This was SO good! I am personally looking forward to all that God has for me to do and what He has to bless me with. Anything that grips fear in us MUST be faced with, dealt with, released, and healed.
ReplyDeleteI also just found you on Twitter. Tagging you from now on every time that I share it there.
ReplyDelete